God Is a Bullet (26 page)

Whispering, Cyrus says, “I want to make a trade.” Then his eyes light over toward the two boys.

The old man speaks to the boys with the wisdom of a parent explaining how his good friend will take them to El Norte for the fine work they’ve done. That a job will be in the offing, this too for the fine work they’ve done. He is a virtual chapbook of compliments about Cyrus, about how he has helped others who helped him. He is contrite about having to go back alone. The boys listen, swimming with the heady hope their dreams are coming true.

All this holds until the old man recedes back into the darkness and the vehicles are loaded and ready. It is then Cyrus comes up to the two boys and lets them have a good look at a Colt banger.

“Take your clothes off, boys from Delicias,”
he says in Spanish.

They stand dazed in their confusion, then look back toward where they came as if the old man might return and explain all this away. Cyrus fires the gun into the air and the boys strip down quickly. Their faces are etched confusion. The others watch. Soon the boys are naked and herded up alongside the van.

Cyrus walks past them, first left to right, then right to left, like a master sergeant before his new recruits. He stops at the one on the left and takes hold of his cock.

“Your God must have wanted you to be a priest,”
he says.

Too scared to respond, the boy can only tremble. Cyrus goes to the next, gives his cock a hard looking over, then takes it up into his hand.

“That’s a real devil’s tail you got there.”

The boy is aghast and refuses to make eye contact.

“A real devil’s tail,” Cyrus repeats with hidden pleasure, letting the weight of it flex across his palm.

Granny Boy comes forward and rapid-fire bangs on the shell of the van with his palms. The boys jump fearfully. He continues on in drumroll fashion. One of the boys starts to cry, and the rest of the pack back Granny Boy up with a cadence of drumrolls against the van’s body.

Gabi lies there, listening through the echoing metal to a crying voice that couldn’t be much older than her own.

Cyrus walks up to the boy on the left and says in Spanish,
“You’re crossing over.”

The boy’s face, which had been locked in blind confusion, slowly begins to see its way, believing this “crossing over” to be good news. But before his lips can clear the teeth in a smile, the Colt jumps in and one shot takes off the better part of his face.

He is thrown back against the van. One of his teeth chings against the frame, scoring it. A hole of blood out behind the ear spurts the white of the wall like a whale’s spout.

The other boy collapses into the sand, begging for his life, groveling around Cyrus’s feet.

When Case awakens, she is alone. She tries to stand, but the rapes have left her insides swollen and bruised. She forces herself to walk, to muscle through the pain. She remembers something she heard once in Junkieland: Defilement, like good intentions, is always with us.

Bob sits against the western wall of the motel on a chink of cement almost wide enough for his ass. He whittles at the ground between his outstretched legs with a hunting knife. Case steps out into the light. Bears a hand over her eyes.

“What time is it?”

“Three o’clock or so.”

She lights a cigarette. He continues to core at the ground.

“Have you slept?” she asks.

He continues to dig with the robotic dedication usually assigned to the mad or the lost.

She squats down and with a calm cradling voice asks, “Don’t you think you should?”

“You’re right, you know.” He runs some dirt off the blade with two fingers. “The reason is close to home. Whatever the reason is. I had this dream days ago. About my … about Sarah and I and … Well, the short of it is we were walking up through Paradise Hills to our house. The house my father-in-law built for us. We were naked. She was pregnant. There were men there, workers, watching. Then for some reason she vomited blood.”

He presses the knife back into the ground. A deep thrust that turns out diamonds of salt-and-pepper rock and pewtery dust.

“It’s all just fragments. You know. Memories, dreams. They strobe at you. I wanted to call my father-in-law to tell him we’re alive. But I also … had a thought I wanted to ask him about. He wasn’t at his house or the office. But Maureen was there.”

“Who is Maureen?”

“She’s his partner, best friend. She’s known us all—Sarah, Gabi, us all—since … well, forever, I guess. She’s one of the few honest people I know.

“She had money from her family and when they went into business, Arthur and her, he was a contractor and they bought up land. Mostly probate stuff. When I was dating Sarah … we were in high school then. I remember they bought up the land of someone who’d been murdered. Out of probate.

“I remember ’cause Maureen was drinking and arguing with John Lee about the bad karma of a thing like that. And Sarah and I were out by the pool thinking how utterly stupid adults were.”

“The old lady out at Furnace Creek?”

“That’s what I asked her.”

“But her land is still there? Empty.”

“Empty and useless as shit. But she had other land …”

“The old lady?”

“Yeah. Maureen remembers that discussion in the house about the property.” Bob stops digging. His throat turns dusky. “Paradise Hills. The tract where I live. The place you came to. That was
her
land.”

Case blows the smoke out of her lungs in one great huff. “No shit.”

He looks out into the perfect isolation of the landscape. Well across the road the ground reaches far up into a long, terraced hillside of boulders and rabbit brush. If he could have trucks and workers and a creek pool to swim in, it could be that same hillside of his dream.

Case tries to put time and motive to the whole thing. “Cyrus was a junkie back then. So his brain was pretty fried. He could have thought himself wronged somehow. Especially him doing the cold throw on his habit in that trailer. That’s heavy shit straight out of the
Twilight Zone
. When you put that extra sting to it—look out.”

“But he told you
he
offed
her
.”

“Right.”

“And twenty-five years later came back …?”

“Don’t be surprised at that. Cyrus is the ultimate scalp hunter. I mean it. His pants—they have scalps on them. Braided hair held in by studs. Hair of people he’s done ten years after they wronged him. Ten years. Some fuckin’ cop that arrested him once, put him in truancy hall. He wrote his name down on a piece of paper. Kept it. Tracked the bastard. Found him in a little house somewhere near Disneyland. Retired. First time he went to off the guy, his life was such shit Cyrus decided to let him live and suffer. A couple of years later, he’s tracking him still, the guy’s daughter gets married. Has a kid. The old shit is now into the grandpa trip. Happy as hell. Bam! That’s when Cyrus got him.” She shakes her head. “He’s a fuckin’ black hole, man.”

Bob sits stiffly, staring at the hole he’s dug. He considers what Case has said, what he has survived so far, what he has discovered by talking with Maureen. He almost gasps, “Twenty-five years later …”

“Down and dirty,” she answers. “You have entered Club Scream with this motherfucker.”

He reaches for her cigarette, takes a long drag and holds the smoke in, as if trying to warm the hole around his heart.

“Have you only just thought about this? Only since you called Maureen?”

“No. When you first said you didn’t believe it was a random act. And at the Ferryman’s. When you talked about the
Furnace Creek murder. It was in my head after that. But I lied it away.”

He starts to dig again at the hole. She watches his straining fingers around the bone handle.

“Why don’t you go in and take a bath and get some sleep? We have to cross the border tonight. I’ll get you food if you want.”

He continues grouting out the rock with a pathetic and limitless anger.

Case delivers Bob into the unfused bajada of broken rocks and boulders. From there he must walk four miles to cross the border just south of the few blocks known as Midway Well.

The plan is for her to drive back to the Mexicali-Calexico crossing, make it through the INS station with the truck. He will carry the weapons so there’s no chance of them getting busted. Then she’ll turn east and wait for Bob at a tin-sheathed diner of sorts that has a death grip on the Route 8 and 98 interchange.

He will start for El Norte and perform the ritual of the coyote, the foreigner, the wetback, the desperate one, to enter back into the land of his past.

Before he embarks on the long walk they sit in the truck wrestling with nightfall and looking into the maze of skull-colored rocks the headlights play to.

“The Hard Rock Cafe, huh.”

He smokes, nods imperceptibly. “It’s got to be done.”

“Bring lawyers, guns, and money.”

“Guns and money, anyway.”

He looks at his watch. The mountains to the west have become
black as checkers, with a few remaining bits of their red counterparts along the teeth line.

“Port of entry,” she says.

“Port of entry,” he says back.

As he gets out of the truck she adds, “I’ll buy you breakfast on the other side.”

“I got all the money.”

“I got enough for breakfast.”

He closes the door. “Wait up for me.”

“Yeah.”

He moves off into the embryonic yellow of the headlights. A slow march with shoulders cross-beamed by the shotgun. Without warning, she wishes she had touched him. His outline becomes a snowy blend of the high-backed dark, and she kicks on the high beams to buy a few last feet of him.

She sees him turn, using the shotgun as the pivot around which he comes. Fingers off the barrel rise into a good-bye.

Sweating through that chilly cape of night, Bob marches woodenly until he reaches a boned pier of rocks. There he kneels and looks out across a cratered valley for signs of the border patrol in their all-purpose vehicles.

He looks for the faint marks of dust their tires will spume up like distant whales on some smoky sea. Or the white searchlight fanning and stalking forward.

Once he is exposed in the flat country, he must watch for any sign of a patrol. The truce he has with himself disintegrates and he begins to see worlds where Arthur and John Lee and Maureen could spell out the cause of the driving death before him.

If that is so, if they were players in part to blame for Via Princessa … well, his mind begins to plan out atrocities. Horrific acts that would make even a Cyrus proud. Inside him a killing landscape unfolds, as alien to him as the landscape he trots through. Over that course of hard miles he is
alive to its violent reality. It fuels him onward. The desk jockey they, and he, so thoroughly nourished is clearly dead.

Then the face of the terrain to the west turns for the worse. A white beam flashes upward, then descends. A great hole out of the blackness rises again.

He kneels down. The sand is turned up a mile off and coming. It’s time to run, coyote. Time to run.

Case can feel drabs of poison from the night before running through her veins. The soft purple river of blood carrying the last stories of heroin from nerve ending to nerve ending.

She watches past the road hour after hour. Past the hulking shapes of headlights rushing by.

Eventually she crosses the road. Walks a long stretch of bedraggled sand watching for Bob in the remains of the night.

She does the battle of putting it all aside. She is sitting morosely alone on a stoop of rocks that lead to nowhere when suddenly a figure andirons out of the earth. A speck against a shield of light coming on and coming on. She stands and blinks like a bird but her eyes are weary. She starts forward out into the desert.

It’s him. She can see now he is dragging with exhaustion. Filthy and sweat-stained.

Upon reaching her he says, “I did some running last night. I did some running.”

“Border patrol?”

He looks back like a soldier who’s cleared the wall, and nods.

She puts her arms around his shoulders and lets him rest there. She feels his heart pumping out through the muscles of his back and into her hands. “I owe you breakfast, Coyote.”

She drives. He sleeps.

She puts some fire into that Dakota as she halfbacks up Route 5 through that great basin of worldly possessions, L.A. proper.

With all that’s on her mind, the whole fucking drive up from the border is like a run through some parallel universe of car dealerships and warehouses and Holiday Inns and cemeteries and the arched yellow monster and billboards hovering electric above the sides of the freeway like dream-machine frigates. The full litany of franchised eyesores.

The hours are one long extended strip mall flanking the road, much the same way shill games and food stands flank a boardwalk. The endless rush of blasted color and flatness from Long Beach to a sky-exhausted LAX.

She floats the radio dial. Comes upon some college station down near Mar Vista in the fifth hour of a Dylan retrospective. The DJ is trying his best to drop his voice that extra octave of approval as he leads into the soundtrack for “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.” He does a few riff minutes about Sam Peckinpah’s take on Pat and Billy and his skew on that morality tale.

They are humping it out to Mojave. California City, more precisely. To a bar Errol owns called the House of Usher, where they’re planning to make a snuff film out of his ass if he doesn’t come across with his planned tête-à-tête with Cyrus.

All this going through her head with an underpinning of Dylan’s rustic guitar and spurs tambourine. Bob is asleep with a little bit of sunlight falling across his chest where the smiley face of his knife wound peeks through. There’s the war sound of the tires on hard cement. The pressing metal of
six lanes charging traffic with their word-picture faces. Heaps of flesh all. Dispersing out through a waste of social landslides with no idea, none, how much blood is on their minds. It’s a blasted allegory that only the third mind of a William S. Burroughs could do justice to.